In the early morning hours of May 22, 2017, the life of 35-year-old Antonio Bassett was cut short by gunfire inside a residence in Washington, D.C. Emergency services, responding to a call around 4:45 a.m., found Bassett in an apartment on the 3900 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, having already succumbed to his injuries.
Days after the shooting, a man named Chad Hawthorne voluntarily went to a police station to discuss the incident.
Initially, he was not considered a suspect and was free to leave. However, his account of the events that transpired in the apartment raised suspicions. Hawthorne, a frequent guest at the same apartment, initially claimed that an unknown man had entered with Bassett, and following an argument between the two, the stranger shot Bassett multiple times before fleeing.
As detectives questioned him further, inconsistencies in Hawthorne’s story began to emerge, leading them to doubt his version of events. The investigation uncovered underlying tensions between Hawthorne and Bassett. The day before the fatal shooting, Hawthorne had been angered by the theft of items from his car, a crime he had reported to the police but then decided not to press charges for. A witness later told investigators that they had seen Bassett with a key to Hawthorne's car weeks prior and that Bassett intended to use the vehicle to purchase drugs. This same witness informed Hawthorne that Bassett might have been involved with his car the day before the murder.
The owner of the apartment where the shooting occurred was awakened by the sound of gunshots and discovered Bassett fatally wounded in the spot where he had been sleeping. The owner also reported seeing a figure resembling Hawthorne running from the apartment immediately after the shooting. Based on the conflicting statements provided by Hawthorne and the witness testimonies, police arrested him. Chad E. Hawthorne, 36, of Southeast Washington, was subsequently charged with second-degree murder while armed in connection with the killing of Antonio Bassett.
